This monograph, one of the few scholarly studies on Trujillo’s dictatorship, is a very valuable contribution to a conceptual analysis of dictatorships in general. Howard J. Wiarda based his conclusions on interviews and research in libraries and archives in the United States and the Dominican Republic, and he conducted research in the latter on six different occasions for periods ranging from a few days to ten mouths. Seven years after the overthrow of Trujillo he still deemed it necessary to protect the anonymity of persons whom he interviewed in a country where the dictator “left his successors with a host of nearly unsolvable problems and no organizational structures with which to begin to solve them” (p. 194).
The author’s principal thesis is this: The fundamental difference between the traditional dictatorship or authoritarianism and the modern dictatorship or totalitarianism is that the former was ordinarily limited to military and political controls, while the latter embraces in addition such areas of life as the family, education, and thought processes. These more comprehensive controls have been created or made possible by industrialization and modern technology. Nations passing from an undeveloped economy toward the modern industrial state are therefore classed as subject to transitional authoritarianism.
After a brief biography of Trujillo, chapters examine the “pillars of his power” (p. 41) and his overthrow; and the last chapter analyzes his regime to determine where it fitted into the conceptual framework. Trujillo’s primary pillar of control was the armed forces but he also exploited the entire governmental structure, which enabled him to exercise a near-monopoly over the national economy. His political philosophy was “perhaps not a full-fledged ideology,” but its importance should not be underestimated. “The principal ideas—nationalism, the need for peace, order, and stability, the organic state, material progress, corporativism, the deification of the leader and the personification of him as the essence of the nation, ‘true’ freedom and democracy—provided not just a rationale for his own practices but also a set of goals and aspirations which rallied Dominican nationalism and patriotism” (p. 176). In his monopoly over education, intellectual life, the communications media, and the thought processes, his regime was tending more and more toward modern totalitarianism. “Trujillo’s system of control, however, was considerably greater than merely the sum total of its parts.. . . The entire system remained under the absolute personal control of Trujillo” (p. 177).
His regime may therefore most accurately be considered as a blend of traditional nineteenth-century caudillo dictatorship, transitional authoritarianism, and modern twentieth-century totalitarianism. The transition to increased totalitarianism is what made his regime “unique in Latin America” (p. 181). It was not fully totalitarian, however; indeed no totalitarian regime has been. (The tautology is a common one among political writers.) Under his dictatorship the rural peasantry was never subjected to the same kinds of totalitarian controls as were the other sectors of the population, because this segment constituted no potential threat. Several factors contributed to his near-totalitarian control: the longevity of his regime (thirty years), the small size of the Dominican Republic, and its isolation from the main currents of modern life.
